The Four Dimensions of Effective mHealth

New mHealth opportunities emerge every day: personalized health care, population health, diagnostics, and management of infectious diseases and global epidemics. The platform necessary to deliver mHealth already exists, and resides in users’ hands. What remains to be firmly established is proven evidence of mobile’s sustainable value to the health care industry. Combined with technology advancements, lessons learned as research findings and clinical experiences accumulate are expected to propel mHealth towards maturity. mHealth strategies are not “one-size-fits-all” and will likely take time to develop and refine. However, health care organizations should take note: Understanding and leveraging the four dimensions of effective mHealth – people, places, payment, and purpose – is a good place to start.